Offshore West Africa (OWA) 2016 – Collaborate and Innovate

Offshore West Africa (OWA) 2016 – Collaborate and Innovate

By Gideon Giwa

The offshore environment continues to deliver exploration and production gains to the oil and gas industry globally. Eni’s Zohr gas discovery, offshore Egypt represents a reminder of the huge potential in this environment. At an estimated in place volume of 30Tcf of biogenic gas in Miocene carbonates, the eastern Mediterranean offers huge gas resources - and the application of technology/planned route to monetization with a parallel (not a traditional back-to-back) opportunity realization approach is an example worth emulating. For more on this, please visit the ENI page.

So, the need to harness more resources while managing cost is a constant pressure on an already weary industry – the recent price decline being a major reminder. Conferences such as OWA are a good opportunity to share knowledge, engage and collaborate – all the values that underpin the foundations of Rocksolve. As a newly established geological solutions company steeped in major industry experience, the Rocksolve team of geological experts will deliver solutions through technological innovation and events like OWA to help towards realising the potential of the west Africa offshore environment.

Ideas we kick around are

Subsurface teams can work together at regional to sub-regional level to share commodity geological knowledge, support cross-company projects and should be encouraged to present their knowledge and practices worth replicating at seminars and conferences

Government regulators to take the lead in creating the environment for data to be made available opening the way for consultants to add value and generate insights which will aid technical teams. Such insights when delivered to individual companies or in collaborative environments such as at thematic subsurface workshops will result in improved performances

Hardly radical… but combine that with problem solving geoscientists that have grown up in a digital age and you’ve got a next gen upstream crew worth talking to.

Kevin Ashton is an acclaimed technology pioneer (and inventor of the term ‘the internet of things’) states in his award winning book HOW TO FLY A HORSE that ‘creation is a chain reaction… thousands of people contribute, most of them anonymous, all of them creative’.

We all know that operators in the industry need to look both inward and outward - we share more in common than we may want to admit. The geology is the same – although our understanding and risk profile may differ, the materials for constructing wells and pipes are very similar and the industry mostly select suppliers from the same base. It is possible, therefore, to look outward for collaboration towards standardization that reduces cost and improves performance.

May the discussions, presentation and networking efforts from thousands of creative minds attending OWA16, contribute to motivating new ideas towards maximizing the resources from the West Africa offshore. At Rocksolve, we remain committed to these ideals – creating the platform for the thousands of geologists, petroleum engineers and business leaders to share what they know, collaborate and innovate.